Every day, you do something you've never done before. But usually it's something like "today I ate three bites of my bagel before taking my first sip of orange juice, which I've done before, but this time I only took a nine-minute shower." Doesn't count. It's just gotta be a judgment call on your part whether something qualifies as new.
With that in mind, even though I didn't do anything particularly amazing yesterday, I did no less than five things I'd never done before, all of which count, according to me. In chronological order:
1. Take the Scarborough RT
The Scarborough RT is the only light-rail system connected to the subway, and it features prominently on the system map, so if you ask me it's part of the subway, which meant taking it for the first time brought me much closer to having been to every stop on the Toronto subway system. Still missing: McCowan (the last stop on the SRT, I got off at the second-last), and maybe Finch. I've probably been to Finch, but I can't specifically remember, so we'll keep it off the list for now.
By the way, I took the SRT to get to Scarborough Town Centre, which is where I was meeting a rideshare to get to Ottawa, where I'm hanging out for March Break, and the site of the next four new things...
2. Go For a Run With a Dog
I met up with my friend Bonnie, who suggested we go for a 5k. I'd been planning on 5king today because I'm training for the Goodlife half-marathon in a couple months, so it wasn't a problem to push the schedule up. Anyway, Bonnie's dog Argo accompanied us and was pretty game. He had to stop to cool off a couple times since he still has his winter coat on and it was relatively warm, which simply meant plunking himself down in the snow for 30 seconds.
3. Drink a Protein Shake
Bonnie is a serious athlete. She's, like, been in the Olympics before or something, I think (for fencing, which is really intimidating). So yeah, she's got her protein situation figured out a lot better than I do. The protein shake was pretty tasty. You might even say it was whey tasty.
4. Play XBox Kinect
XBox Kinect is really cool. I don't really follow video games, so maybe I'm way off-base on this, but it seems like it's been hyped much less than the Wii was when it came out, but based on my limited experience, Kinect is a lot cooler. There's no controller, you just stand in front of the screen and do stuff. FREE FROM THE SHACKLES OF THE CONTROLLER! Finally.
We played the Kinect dancing game, which is something like a cross between Dance Dance Revolution and Guitar Hero. It's much better than DDR, though, because you do actual dance moves instead of just stepping on squares. Like, for example, one of the songs is Crank That, and you actually do the Crank That dance moves. Totally sweet.
5. Go to Trivia Night at a Bar
I met with some teacher's college friends and we hit up trivia night at the Lieutenant's Pump, one of my favourite Ottawa bars (and, incidentally, the first I ever went to when I came looking for a place to live before moving here). There were probably seven or eight teams, some of whom were apparently regulars, but when all was said and done, we totally kicked all their asses. The trivia dude was like "usually I tell new teams that it takes a few times to get used to the questions, blah blah blah". Sure, buddy.
We each had different strengths, which is what you want in a trivia team I guess. Total team effort. We really came together. Stayed within ourselves. 110%. Some of my best answers: identifying the "hardest" song (Daniel by Bat For Lashes) (even though I couldn't get most of the "easier" ones), and successfully spelling (Peter) Sarsgaard and (Maggie) Gyllenhaal. I have Saturday Night Live to thank for that one ('their wedding gifts came from Craate and Baarrel').
The prize was $10 of food at the bar, each, which paid for most of my dinner. Sweet deal!
Anyway: such a good day for the old bucket list. I hope you have a bucket-worthy day!
